Widgets are all the craze, but the challenge is how to build channels that will enhance brand equity and the interactive utility you provide your audience.
Here we are, rounding the final corner of what was dubbed, "The Year of the Widget." And yet I still seem to meet many people who aren't quite sure what opportunities are available in the "widgetsphere," how to decipher the many confusing names, or where to start.
Here is a primer on the main types of widgets and how they can make a difference for your brand.
Web-based widgets
Back in the late 1990s, content syndication and affiliate programs were all the rage. Unfortunately, our web technologies weren't up to the task. Today, these ideas are still the basis for web widgets using Flash and AJAX that we have today.
In a nutshell, widgets are a small, useful piece of a web page that can be inserted for use in any other web page. Social networking and blog-making services have made an ideal platform for widgets because, after all, their basic task is to make web page building easy for anyone. When brands make inserting syndicated or user-generated content easy to add (read: copy and paste) to these easy-bake pages, voila: widget explosion.
But don't underestimate the power in being able to do this effectively. Giving people a way to create their own pieces of interaction using your technology (and branding) is tremendously popular. So popular that comScore started measuring it, and it counts more than 177 million unique views for web-based widgets this year alone.
As I mentioned in my previous article, "Make Flash work harder for your brand," the coolest thing about web-based widgets is that they only appear on the sites of people who adopt them.
What you're really seeing when viewing a branded web widget on a blog or social networking site is a small piece of real estate dedicated to the syndicates' content.
Having that space taken out for free, on your brand's behalf, is where the viral marketing begins. Provide a function that people need to make their site creation and/or promotion easier, and they'll happily reward you with clicks back to your service.
Think of it as a shared open window to a single site. Or a banner campaign where each user gets to dictate the content that appears in exchange for giving that brand the space on their site.
This rich, banner-based philosophy is a good one for brand managers used to the challenges of creating campaigns across networks like PointRoll. Just as you have to reformat the banner for multiple sizes and different functional capabilities across the sites within the ad network, the same types of changes apply when creating widgets for the various social networks, blog platforms, or anywhere else you want your widget to appear.
This is the angle Google is taking with OpenSocial. By "standardizing" (really Google-izing) the way you need to prepare these widgets for use across many social networks, you only have to create one widget version to deploy on MySpace and among a host of other affiliated social networking sites. This provides brands with far more efficiency, faster time-to-market, and deployment across a larger audience than Facebook. The trade-off here is funding Google's own reach and giving them more leverage in the space in exchange for that efficiency.